Hi! I had to manually remove decimals and tildes from a text file. How
could I have done this via programming? I googled this but didn’t
really find anything, just stuff on removing spaces. Basically, I’d
like to be able to search a file and remove certain items (ex - all
decimals and tildes). Thanks!
woodyee wrote:
Hi! I had to manually remove decimals and tildes from a text file. How
could I have done this via programming? I googled this but didn’t
really find anything, just stuff on removing spaces. Basically, I’d
like to be able to search a file and remove certain items (ex - all
decimals and tildes). Thanks!
Sounds like a job for regular expressions. Have you got a short before
and after example?
On Nov 28, 9:44 am, Alex Y. [email protected] wrote:
–
Alex
Sure. See below. Basically, the entire document was like this. To me,
Reg Exp’s were the key but they’re a weakness of mine so I was
lost. 
Original
89.00~~~~
6330.00~15~CAT1~0005~1.00
Modified
woodyee wrote:
–
6330.00~15~CAT1~0005~1.00Modified
89
6330 15 CAT1 0005 1
irb(main):001:0> file = “89.00~~~~
irb(main):002:0” 6330.00~15~CAT1~0005~1.00
irb(main):003:0"
irb(main):004:0" "
=> “89.00~~~~\n6330.00~15~CAT1~0005~1.00\n\n”
irb(main):005:0> file.gsub(/.\d+/, ‘’).tr(’~’, ’ ')
=> “89 \n6330 15 CAT1 0005 1\n\n”
irb(main):006:0> puts _
89
6330 15 CAT1 0005 1
I think that should do it 
I don’t think it’s feasible to do it all
in a single pass, which is why I’ve gone for separate gsub and tr
phases.
On Nov 28, 8:38 am, woodyee [email protected] wrote:
Hi! I had to manually remove decimals and tildes from a text file. How
could I have done this via programming? I googled this but didn’t
really find anything, just stuff on removing spaces. Basically, I’d
like to be able to search a file and remove certain items (ex - all
decimals and tildes). Thanks!
How about…
“he~~ll.o”.tr(‘~.’, ‘’) # => “hello”
String#tr translates a group of characters into another group, such
that for every character in a given position in group one, it is
replaced by the character in the same position in group two, or if
group two is shorter, it uses the last character in group two. In this
case, group two is empty, so everything in group one is replaced with
empty strings (i.e., deleted).
HTH,
Jordan
On Nov 28, 2:00 pm, yermej [email protected] wrote:
ruby -i.bak -n -e ‘print $_.gsub(/[.~]/, “”)’ input_file.txt
Jeremy
WOW! It worked and it was so cool!! Thanks! One thing I did - I
modified it to delete the .00’s:
ruby -i.bak -n -e ‘print $_.gsub(/[.00~]/, " ")’ input_file.txt
This worked but it deleted the zero in front of the decimal. How can I
avoid this? Thanks!
On Nov 28, 8:38 am, woodyee [email protected] wrote:
Hi! I had to manually remove decimals and tildes from a text file. How
could I have done this via programming? I googled this but didn’t
really find anything, just stuff on removing spaces. Basically, I’d
like to be able to search a file and remove certain items (ex - all
decimals and tildes). Thanks!
This will remove all decimals and tildes and create a backup of the
original file with the extension .bak (from the command line):
ruby -i.bak -n -e ‘print $_.gsub(/[.~]/, “”)’ input_file.txt
Jeremy
On Nov 28, 3:50 pm, woodyee [email protected] wrote:
This will remove all decimals and tildes and create a backup of the
This worked but it deleted the zero in front of the decimal. How can I
avoid this? Thanks!
Typically, when you characters in [], it means to match any character
in that group. So, [.00~] is the same as [.0~] is the same as [0.~]
etc. so you removed all occurrences of 0, ., and ~ no matter what
surrounded them.
If you want to delete just .00 and ~, try:
/.00|~/
as the first argument to gsub. That means match .00 or ~ and nothing
else.
This is probably a decent site if you want to learn more about regular
expressions:
Jeremy